This study used a design experiment that instructs children on how to approach each letter to investigate typography design methodologies and manual techniques. Since children are still in the early stages of learning and the content they are exposed to is of great significance, the topic of children's education is always one that the entire…

Preschoolers' prosocial behaviours support healthy interpersonal relationships as a component of their social adjustment process. Although several studies have found links between parental marital characteristics and preschoolers' prosocial behaviours, these conclusions were divisive. Therefore, a meta-analysis was conducted to clarify the…

Instability in early childhood education and care (ECEC) arrangements may have detrimental consequences on children's mental health. This study examined ECEC trajectories in the first 30 months of life for 373 children from low-income families in Toronto. We provide information about patterns of instability and reasons for instability. We also…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who are also minimally verbal may require specialized interventions to promote the development of vocalizations. Preliminary research supports an innovative procedure called response contingent stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) as a potentially effective procedure to promote vocalizations. The primary aim…

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in increased parenting stress and substance use. At the same time that mental health and social service needs increased, access to services, including among those receiving treatment, decreased due to stay-at-home orders. Few programs were equipped or prepared to translate their interventions to a virtual format at…

The present study investigated whether distinct developmental patterns of externalizing behaviors (EBs: hyperactivity-impulsivity, noncompliance, physical aggression) based on parent reports were repeatedly and differentially associated with separate dimensions of internalizing problems such as general anxiety, separation anxiety, and depressive…

Therapeutic playgroups have potential to benefit families and children enrolled in early intervention. A pretest-posttest, mixed methods, sequential explanatory design was utilized to explore the effectiveness and feasibility of an 8-week SEE Me (Social Emotional Education) therapeutic playgroup delivered by a collaborative team of providers using…

The purposes of the present study were a) to evaluate the construct validity of a questionnaire measuring parental physical activity (PA) orientation, and b) to examine the association between constructs of parental PA orientation and parental explicit PA modelling in parents of young children with disabilities. One hundred and thirty-five…

The home numeracy environment is an essential construct that helps explain children's numeracy skills. However, this field has been developed mostly focusing on monolingual English-speaking families, and cultural differences that contextualize the home environment have not been considered. This study describes the home numeracy environment of…

Purpose: Treatment response is the degree to which an individual benefits from a treatment. This systematic review sought to identify and synthesize research evidence regarding individual characteristics that predict language treatment response among children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: To be eligible for inclusion,…

Purpose: The present study evaluated the applicability of the sentence-focused framework to Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) by examining the relative contribution of receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes to later grammatical complexity. Method: Participants were 51 Mandarin-speaking children who received cochlear…

Purpose: The current study examined the predictive role of gestures and gesture-speech combinations on later spoken language outcomes in minimally verbal (MV) autistic children enrolled in a blended naturalistic developmental/behavioral intervention (Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, and Regulation [JASPER] + Enhanced Milieu Teaching…

Peer collaboration is a foundational skill that emerges in early childhood. Children spend significant time in early educational settings, making it an important setting where young children can learn how to collaborate with peers. However, research on how to support children's collaboration effectively is limited and findings in this area have…

Effortful control, the ability to suppress a dominant response over a subdominant one, is a fundamental aspect of self-regulation. It has been observed that higher levels of parenting stress are associated with lower levels of effortful control in children. Perceived social support, an important factor in reducing parenting stress, may act as a…

This dissertation focuses on the acquisition of the English verbal "be"--passive and the interaction between the lexical meaning of a verb and young children's observed behavior with the verb in the passive. Specifically, I investigate how children exploit lexical semantic information from their input in order to learn which verbs can…